Dynamic Learning Communities:
An Alternative to Designed Instructional Systems

Brent Wilson
University of Colorado at Denver

Martin Ryder
Storage Technology Corporation

In the wake of the constructivist movement in psychology and education,
the field of instructional design (ID) is reexamining its relationship to
learning and instruction. Many ID theorists are calling for more situated
approaches to the design of instruction, encouraging teachers and local
groups to take ownership of the design process and adapt their methods and
goals to the needs of students and stakeholders
(e.g., Wilson, Teslow, and Osman-Jouchoux, 1995).
Others have defended traditional views of instructional design as a
prescriptive science, charged with developing
universal methods and strategies that will result in effective, efficient
instruction (Merrill, Drake, Lacy, & Pratt, 1996).

The problem is exacerbated by the growing negative connotation of
instruction. To many constructivist educators, what they are trying
to accomplish with students cannot be captured by instruction.
Instruction
is typically thought to have clear, prespecified learning objectives,
teacher-determined activities and instructional strategies, and clear
boundaries in time and space. What happens when learning happens, but not
in such clearly directed, controlled terms? ID theorists are examining
alternate metaphors such as "learning environments" to understand and
describe learning where the learner assumes more direction and control
over goals, content, and methods (e.g., Wilson, 1996).

The idea of learning communities has also been discussed as an
alternative metaphor to traditional instruction. What happens when groups
of people gather together to provide mutual support for learning and
performance? How would that work? Rather than being controlled by a
teacher or an instructional designer, learners might "self-organize" into
functioning communities with a general goal of supporting each other in
their learning. That is to say, the function of guidance and control
becomes distributed among group participants. Specific roles of group
members are not assigned but rather emerge from the interaction of the
whole.

This paper is our initial effort to outline the concept of a dynamic
learning community as an alternative to teacher-controlled or pre-designed
instructional systems. We argue that dynamic learning communities
constitute an important alternative to specifically designed
instructional systems, and that communication technologies can serve to
support learning communities in their efforts. We present below an
outline of our current thinking. For future papers, we intend to gather
more examples or case reports concerning specific learning communities.

What is a Dynamic Learning Community?

Our definition for DLCs is offered in Table 1. We see DLCs as
decentralized groups focused and interacting enough to form a stable
community. Let us first unpack the elements of the term:

Communities
Groups become communities when they interact with each other
and stay together long enough to form a set of habits and conventions, and
when they come to depend upon each other for the accomplishment of certain
ends.

Learning communities
In truth, all communities learn. One of the
lessons of postmodernism and situated cognition is that learning cannot be
separated from action. We are learning every day, in everything we do.
We add the qualifying term to our defin ition to suggest a community
sharing a consensual goal to support each other in learning. Everybody
expects to learn and is prepared to engage in activities at least partly
for that reason. This would distinguish learning communities from those
solely concerned with entertainment, political action, or the performance
of an immediate task. We would note, however, that groups can have
complex agendas, and that a group may have multiple goals that are
commonly shared throughout the membership, such as sup porting both work
performance and learning among its members.

Dynamic learning communities
The term dynamic is added to distinguish
the construct from traditional, centralized groups of learners found in
many classrooms. In a dynamic community, all members share control, and
everyone learns, including the teacher or group leader
(cf. Wilson & Cole, 1997;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994).
Transformative communication
is the norm, with both sender and receiver of messages changed by the
interaction (Pea, 1994; Ryder, 1995).
Thus a classroom wherein the teacher assigns a
project, expecting the students to learn something but not expecting
herself to learn--such a classroom would not yet be a dynamic learning
community because all participants are not engaged in the learning
experience.

Dynamic learning communities (DLCs) are groups of people who form a
learning community generally characterized by the following:

distributed control;

commitment to the generation and sharing of new knowledge;

flexible and negotiated learning activities;

autonomous community members;

high levels of dialogue, interaction, and collaboration;

a shared goal, problem, or project that brings a common focus and
incentive to work together.

We would expected to see the following additional characteristics over time:

Negative Outcomes

DLCs are the sort of open, adaptive system described by Kevin Kelly in his
book Out of Control (Kelly, 1994). Open systems are
defined by "(1) the
absence of imposed centralized control; (2) the autonomous nature of
subunits; (3) the high connectivity be tween the subunits, and (4) the
webby nonlinear causality of peers influencing peers"
(Kelly 1994, p. 22, reformatted).

According to complexity theorists (see also Gleick, 1987;
Hayles, 1991;
Prigogine & Stengers, 1984;
Waldrop, 1992),
a complex, adaptive system takes on life-life qualities such as
intelligence, intentionality,
self-correctability, and self-preservation. Examples of complex systems
include the stock market, ecological systems, and living organisms.
Similar qualities of intentionality and adaptivity should emerge in a
learning community if they have the characteristics noted in Table 1 and
further discuss ed below.

Distributed control.
In a typical classroom, the teacher is in charge.
The teacher makes all the important decisions, such as what to teach and
how to teach it. In a DLC, nobody is in control--everybody is!
Conventions, shared understandings, rules for settling disputes or for
governing communications--All of these are negotiated and agreed upon by
the group as a whole. So are learning goals and methods. If one member
has a different vision for where the group should be going, this is
presented to the group and discussed. The community is bigger than any
single member, yet it encompasses the perspectives of all members.

Commitment to the generation and sharing of new knowledge.
Everybody
learns. Nobody stands apart, pulling the strings for the sake of the
others. By sharing, listening, imitating, and watching, all members of
the learning community benefit. Those with greater expertise play critical
roles in helping and modeling, yet they are expected to learn, solve
problems, find answers, right along with the rest of the group.

Flexible and negotiated learning activities.
Specific learning goals and
activities largely happen. There is a sort of natural selection of
activities--Those that are successful and lead to learning are repeated
and developed and shared, while those that are not supported by the group
fall into disuse. This can lead to inefficiencies and a meandering
process of development, but it can work.

Autonomous community members.
One of Kelly's key components of complex
systems is that of autonomous agents; that is, community
members must
have a certain room to direct their own activities and make decisions.
There needs to be room for variation and differences among community
members; otherwise the system devolves down to a single controlled
perspective.

High levels of dialogue, interaction, and collaboration.
High levels of
connectivity are essential to complex systems and to DLCs in particular.
A neighbor may be doing great things, but if that information is not
shared via constant communication, then other community members will not be
aware of it. Information is what drives the feedback loops that lead to
new learning and change in the overall system.

A common focus and incentive to work together. DLCs need a reason to
exist. This may come from shared interests, or a common goal, problem, or
project. Outside constraints, such as market or job demands, may provide
an incentive for a group to form. Work groups may be motivated to keep
their jobs. The free market of Internet listservs may allow communities
to coalesce around very localized interests, such as breeding border
collies or following the fortunes of an NFL franchise. Public-school
students may converge on a project or major assignment, such as a
yearbook or newspaper. Students in Carnegie-type classrooms may be
hard-pressed to find a threshold of common purpose sufficient to create a
truly dynamic learning community. Certainly such a concept competes with
the bulk of school conventions and cultural forms.

Consistent with other complex systems, we would expect to see a number of
additional features emerge in DLCs, some positive and some negative.
These are briefly discussed below.

Positives

Capacity to adapt to local conditions and evolve over time.
Because DLCs
depend upon each member for information, DLCs should be able to pick up on
changes in the environment more quickly than controlled instructional
groups. Behavior of DLCs are more fluidly defined and more flexible than
fixed-goal and fixed-strategy systems, allowing easier adaptation and
change over time.

Creativity and innovation. DLCs will tend to be more pluralistic than
instructional systems because behavior is not centrally controlled. Much
variant behavior may prove unfruitful, but in amid the diversity, some
ideas will show promise. Thus creativity, change, and innovation should
be more prevalent than in instructional systems. The DLC may experience
more failures, but more innovative successes as well.

Crossing of traditional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.
Typically, a DLC cares less about its disciplinary base than the problem
it is trying to solve.(1)
Workers from a variety of backgrounds, for
example, may form a DLC if they face a common challenge or problem. Each
person brings the baggage of their prior experience, and each submits to
being influenced by the community. The cross-fertilization that results
can lead to new categories and new perspectives not previously perceived
by established communities.

Appreciation of diversity, multiple perspectives, and epistemic
issues.
Expertise is inherently multi-perspectival in a DLC. Members come to
respect knowledge that comes from a variety of sources--people of
different backgrounds and information of different types. Likewise,
community members develop their own methods for testing proposed knowledge
against a variety of standards and codifying that knowledge in a way that
can be shared throughout the group and across situations and time. The
upshot of this diverse environment is that community members progress in
their epistemic understanding, perhaps moving from black-and-white views
of knowledge toward more sophisticated views of how we come to know
things.

Community members who are responsible and skilled at diagnosing and
addressing their learning needs. Here is both a benefit and a challenge
to DLCs. When control is distributed throughout the group, more demands
are placed on individual members. Becaus e teacher is no longer doing the
hard work of deciding on goals, methods, and new knowledge, community
members must meet the challenge of assuming these roles. Metacognitive
knowledge--knowing how to monitor one's learning and how to address
ill-defined problems--becomes an essential part of the community, which
hopefully can also be shared throughout the group. A systemic analysis
may conclude that a given group cannot become a DLC because of
deficiencies in this area. On the other hand, a group may progress
incrementally in these skills and move steadily toward more self- (or
community-) directed learning.

Negatives

Short-term inefficiencies. Just as a Vermont town meeting can be more
laborious and inefficient than a professionally managed city's
well-defined processes, so DLCs can be more inefficient and indirect than
controlled instruction. A well-packaged instructional program may be
able to teach a fixed set of rules more efficiently. If such a product
were reliably available, then a DLC would be wise to recommend its use.
In the absence of such structure, however, DLCs may tend to "muddle
through" (cf. Bateson, 1972, pp. 3-8)
with its share of redundancies, inefficiencies, lack of focus, and lengthy
processes.

In the long term, however, DLCs may be an efficient route toward learning.
A cow does not look for the shortest route up a hill, but rather keeps its
head down and looks for a steady way up without noticeable climbing. The
result is the most efficient use of its energy (Allen, 1996).
DLCs will tend to meander. But like the cow up the hill, the shortest path
may not always be the wisest path, and certainly not the most efficient path.

Lack of central control. DLC's decentralized control can be a
handicap. The
leadership and vision of a charismatic leader can marshal community
resources and stimulate purposive action. At times, the unwieldy,
amorphous character of a DLC can frustrate those who expect
well-defined, focused directions in the learning process.

Lack of predictability. DLCs can frustrate the intentions of the best
designers. A constant among initiators of DLCs is the reported surprise
at the direction the group takes. DLCs seem to have a mind of their own,
and where they end up is not where they start. This is true of
distance-learning groups, workgroups, and learning communities within
classrooms. Often the surprises are pleasant, but the evolving nature of
the group can be difficult for people trying to plan for the future.

In one sense, DLCs can be thought of as being learner-centered. Community
members must take more responsibility for their own learning than in most
designed instructional systems. In another sense, however, the
"centeredness" is found in the community rather than the individual
learner. Ideally, community members lacking metacognitive skills may
participate and receive support from the group. The group often dictates
the learning agenda--or at least engages individuals in dialogue
concerning that agenda. The thought of individuals isolated, setting
individual goals, pursuing those learning goals individually--This is
contrary to our conception of a dynamic learning community. So we tend to
think of DLCs not simply as tools for self-directed learning, but as
supportive communities wherein a variety of learning goals may be pursued,
some individual and some shared throughout the membership.

Three Scenarios

In this section, we present three scenarios we have observed, where
dynamic learning communities (or DLCs) are beginning to take root.

Workplace learning.
Martin works with a group of engineers charged with
developing new products and specifications for supporting those new
products. Martin finds himself working on products whose standards have
not yet been finalized, which in any case will be replaced within 18
months by another standard or a newer, more capable product. When a
standard doesn't exist, where does an engineer go to get answers?
Off-the-shelf training is no help except for generic skills. Customized
training products such as computer-based training take too long too
develop and would not be cost-effective for the specialized needs of the
small engineering workgroup. Hiring a consultant/trainer to come from the
university and give lectures is a possibility, but often the expertise is
not available, and when it is, the costs of pulling people away from their
work in a high-pressure environment can be enormous. Even traditional
performance support systems--electronic or otherwise--exact a toll in time
and effort. These systems must be designed, and therein lies the
problem: nobody knows enough to design them, and if they did, they would
be too busy putting out immediate fires to take the time. In short,
expertise is scarce and doesn't exist in any form specifically designed
for instruction or support.

As an alternative to traditional training and performance-support
solutions, Martin has been promoting the concept of shared problem solving
and archiving of solutions. When an engineer needs help, she asks for
help among the workgroup. If someone has an answer, the solution is
shared publicly and archived for future reference. Getting engineers to
think in terms of mutual, collaborative support is a challenge, but given
the pace of change and the demands for expertise, they really have no
choice. They must learn to share expertise, or they will not survive in
their competitive environment. This general approach of mutual support
for learning is further discussed in later sections of the paper.

Academic culture.
What is an academic program? Is a masters program the
sum of courses required of students for the degree, or is it something
more? How does an academic unit's local culture serve to encourage
learning--within classes, on collaborative projects, or among individual
students and faculty? Brent has been reflecting on ways that students,
faculty, staff, friends, and alumni all work together to foster learning
and professional growth. The communications infrastructure provided by
e-mail and the World-Wide Web can serve to facilitate higher levels of
connectivity and participation and new learning.

In the case of higher education, faculty members benefit as much as
students from the interaction and sharing of expertise. Because faculty
members do not typically return to school for more degrees, they rely on
professional interactions--including stim ulus from students--as a key
resource for new learning.

For the last couple of years, Brent and colleagues have been exploring
ways to strengthen the collaborative sharing and out-of-class learning
that naturally occurs in and around the academic program (see
Wilson, Ryder, McCahan, & Sherry, 1996
for a report of their work). Students with
resources of their own become less dependent on professors and courses as
sources of expertise, and move toward a wider variety of learning
activities and interactions. Over time, these informal interactions come
to constitute a learning community, and become as important to the
education of participants as formal courses.

Internet discussion groups.
Globally, a swell of informal or distributed
learning initiatives have taken shape, using the Internet as its medium.
Indeed, the Internet serves as a sort of "petri dish" wherein a variety of
informal cultures have begun sprouting up. Many of these learning
initiatives are independent of traditional instruction. Participants in a
listserv such as IT Forum, for example, may engage in high-level
discussions concerning technology in education, yet their participation
may not be reflected in course credit and may not be governed by a teacher
or instructional designer (Rieber, 1996).
People may especially benefit
from participating on global forums when expertise is rare within their
local environment. In a way, the monopoly of expertise is being shaken
loose from the universities, big businesses, large cities, and developed
countries, and is being distributed throughout the world via the Internet.
The opportunities afforded by new communication technologies will
eventually have profound implications for how we think about learning and
instruction.

The DLC Learning Process: The Dialogical Case

Learning can happen in a variety of ways within a DLC; however, a pattern
of mutual support will tend to emerge, outlined in Table 2 below. Each
step is described in turn.

Articulate the learning need. This becomes the learning "problem" or
goal.

Seek help in a group forum.

Engage in a help consultation.

Assess learning.

Share the solution with the group. Restate the problem and solution if
necessary.

Archive the interaction or the restated solution for future reference.

Repeat this process, of any part, as necessary to support learning.

Table 2. A dialogical approach to learning within DLCs.

Articulate the learning need.
A community member becomes aware that she
or he lacks some skill or knowledge. The learning need may not be fully
analyzed; that is, how the needed knowledge relates to a particular
problem or performance need not be fully specified at the outset. The
need to know becomes a "problem" or learning goal for the individual.

Seek help in a group forum.
The community member then seeks help, often
in a public forum, such as a distribution list or listserv maintained by
the DLC.

Engage in a help consultation.
Another community member helps or consults
with the first member. Help consultations may draw on a variety of
resources:

human resources

archived interactions

FAQs

information search tools

performance supports

instruction

Community members may discuss the issue at length, publicly--Or the help
consultation may be simple, direct, and private.

Assess learning.
Community members have a variety of tools to use in
testing out new knowledge or skill. If the help consultation provides
incomplete information, the community member may succeed in filling in the
missing information. A recommended procedure can be tried out; if it
fails and the problem can't be solved, the person goes back and reports
the problem and repeats the interactive process. If new knowledge is
offered, it is tested against prior knowledge and understanding. New
Knowledge can also be compared across members of the group. Typically, a
combination of self-assessment and consensual agreement is the norm.

Share the solution with the group.
After new knowledge or skill is tried
out and confirmed, the solution is shared with the group. A restatement
of the original problem and its solution may be helpful, especially for
future reference.

Archive for future reference.
Ideally, every DLC interaction should be
archived for future retrieval. If an automatic archiving system is not in
place, then each solved problem or significant interaction should be
stored in a public location for future access by any member of the group
(Ryder, 1995; Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1994).

Repeat as necessary.
Although listed in steps, the general process is
flexible. Any step or set of steps may be repeated in the process of
generating solutions to learning problems.

The process above typifies interactions where a specific learning need is
identified. A common alternative is the kind of informal discussion
characteristics of many listservs and discussion groups. Frequently,
knowledge sharing is not problem-driven but rather conversation-driven.
In those cases, the learning activity is less strategic and less defined,
but learning is nonetheless supported by mutual sharing and concern around
a topic of interest.

Managing Expertise in the DLC

One challenge DLCs have is keeping both experts and novices happy
interacting within the same group. Novices have a tendency to ask
inappropriate questions and to not use the full resources available to
them. Experts can feel overworked, exploited, or unchallenged--feeling
that they aren't learning anything. How does a learning community deal
with the varying needs of its members? Before we specifically address
this question, a few general comments are in order.

Expertise is relative and multi-faceted. Expert and novice roles
fluctuate within the community. Brent is an expert at one thing, Martin
at another. Some members may be expert at group cohesion, serving a
critical support role in keeping the community together. Others may
participate irregularly, but have important input at certain junctions.
Certainly labels such as "expert" or "novice" do not capture the richness
of the expertise that is distributed throughout a learning community.

There must be a legitimate self-interest to sustain individual
participation. At the individual level, community members must each feel
a personal return on their investment in the group. In this sense, a
perceived self-interest must accompany continuing involvement with the
community. There are, however, a number of grounds for self-interest.
Some people get tremendous satisfaction out of helping others. Some
people like to think of themselves as being a source of expertise to
others. Some people have a need to feel connected to groups of people,
even when significant new learning happens only irregularly. Some people
develop a sense of loyalty and constancy, committing time and resources to
a community because it helps them find a "home." All of these may be
reasons why a person with considerable expertise may choose to participate
in a diverse learning community.

Martin has an example from engineering. An Internet discussion list
exists around new standards for the next generation of the SCSI interface.
List members have a variety of motives for participating. A sales and
marketing person may feel like a novice, with a need to upgrade his
understanding of technical details. An experienced engineer may
participate because she feels a need to maintain a link to "people out
there" and understand people's reactions to proposals and possibilities.
This knowledge will then help her in establishing better standards. The
list thrives because people depend upon each other and need the different
kinds of expertise available among the group.

We return again to the different needs of novices and experts within
learning communities. Novices often feel intimidated, or may tend to
under-utilize available resources, while experts' time is often overtaxed
with questions and service demands, leaving little time for the renewal
of their own expertise. We offer several possible strategies that DLCs
might choose to adopt in addressing the general problem, summarized in
Table 3 below.

The strategies suggested in Table 3 are possibilities only. Several would
curtail or constrain free interaction within the group, thus inhibiting
the "dynamic" nature of the learning community. Care should be taken not
to fix a problem that doesn't exist. Specific policies can best be
determined by consensus among the local community, and evolve over time as
needs change.

ID versus DLCs?

Both instructional design (ID) and DLCs can lead to learning. However,
other things being equal, we believe that open systems are preferred
because they address more fundamental learning outcomes, e.g.,
self-directed inquiry, learning-how-to-learn, metacognition, etc., and
are more closely situated within a natural performance environment. The
following table presents an outline of variables to consider when choosing
between DLCs and designed instructional systems.
Use Instructional Design if these conditions apply:

stable content over time;

well-defined content;

best for algorithms and rules;

heavy representation demands;

mastery of discrete knowledge is valued.

Try DLCs if these conditions apply:

volatile, changing, or new content;

ill-defined content;

best for complex problems and content;

heavy literacy and metacognitive demands;

community-directed, situated support for learning is valued.

The following are relevant (but NOT determining) factors:

level of expertise;

criticality of content.

Table 4. Factors to consider when deciding between designed
instruction and dynamic learning communities.

Note that the criticality of the learning or the advancedness of the
skills are not determining factors when deciding between designed
instruction and DLCs. That is, DLCs can be effectively used at varying
levels of expertise, and with critically important content. Where
certification of expertise is necessary, however, individuals should
demonstrate their expertise using accepted assessment methods, regardless
of the method of learning support.

In general, the more stable, defined, and discrete the content, the more
sense to design instruction to meet the learning need. Contrariwise, the
more volatile, ill-defined, and complex the learning needs, the more sense
to try dynamic learning communities as a support strategy.

In the end, the decision between designed instruction and DLCs is partly
one of utility and partly one of value. That is, given the same ends,
DLCs may prove more or less effective in accomplishing learning. Seen in
this way, the issue is one of utility . Taken the next level, however,
designed instruction cannot be said to accomplish the same ends as DLCs,
and vice versa. At this point, the decision necessarily rests on the
question: What learning ends do we really value? Members of dynamic
learning communities will come out of their experience with different
skills, perspectives, and appreciations than graduates of an instructional
program. These differences must be respected and considered when choosing
between approaches to learning support--in addition to the utilitarian
considerations mentioned above.

Costs. Modern in-school environments are conditioned to the
structure of designed instruction and a dramatic shift from
traditional instructional models to DLCs would
not come without the significant investment toward committed cultural
change in school environments. Such investment would include tools
and structures that support new users, new strategies and new
understandings for teachers and students about the learning process.
The dramatic successes for learning demonstrated by the Dewey school of
the 1930s is far outweighed by the dramatic failure of that model to become
adopted by the traditional educational infrastructure.

Out-of-school environments are more natural habitats for DLCs
(see Resnick, 1987) and this
mode of learning prevails, albeit informally, as a dominant training culture
in industry. However, the informal character DLCs rarely
enjoys the same recognition as formal training in the budget and planning
activities of an organizaiton. The
cost of DLC's in industry is the cost of allowing employees to break away
from their isolated duties to enable apprentice observation, collaboration,
and formal discussions about work related tasks and issues, the ability
to archive new knowledge in retrievalbe structures, and the ability
to engage in Internet discussions and research activities that relate to
job-specific problems and issues. At this point, we
really don't know enough about cost comparisons to offer a definitive
cost-benefit analyses. More data on this subject will be helpful as
DLCs become more widely recognized, more heavily used, and formally
studied.

Control of DLCs

As we made emphasized above, because DLCs are open systems, control is
distributed throughout the community. This can be both a strength and a
weakness. Examples of problems that can arise include:

pornography access in a middle school;

bomb-assembly instructions two or three links away from your homepage;
(2)

Deciding how to deal with these kinds of problems brings us back to the
core differences between open learning systems and closed instructional
systems. We may choose to respond to problems by seeking to limit the
openness of resources available to a DLC . Possible methods for exerting
some measure of control over DLCs include:

list moderation;

control over membership;

externally mandated rules and conventions;

imposed problems or learning activities;

imposed assessment standards.

Such attempts are controlling DLCs constitute a compromise of their open
nature. Thus the learning community becomes something of a hybrid between
a DLC and a designed instructional system. Such compromises may be
necessary in schools or other real-life settings, but they should be
implemented very carefully, since interventions can have unpredictable
effects on group functioning. This again is another area that we know
very little about, in need of further research.

Conclusion

Heretofore, instructional designers have thought they were in the business
of designing instructional systems to meet prespecified learning
objectives. But first the constructivist movement--and now communication
technologies themselves--seem to be thre atening this conception as the
sole way to support learning. People are learning without help from
designed instruction! In many settings, in fact, "natural" learning is
more prevalent than "designed" learning (Resnick, 1987).
We believe that
the situation requires a reexaminination of our core roles. Are we in
the business of designing instruction or are we in the business of
supporting valuable learning, wherever it may happen? The answer to this
question will result in either a narrow or broad interpretation of our
role and its relationship to non-instructional forms of learning.

Our own belief is that dynamic learning communities are proper objects of
study. We should seek to understand how such communities function, how
they grow, how they can be nurtured, and how they can be replicated across
diverse settings. But nurturing is different than designing. We must
respect the integrity of the community. In time, we may come to think of
ourselves more as learning technologists than as instructional
technologists, and learning support specialists more than
instructional designers. But these are issues best addressed at
length in a separate paper.

In conclusion, the development of new communications, storage, and
representation technologies constitute a watershed in the history of open
learning environments, making DLCs more feasible than they have been in
the past. This is a situation where the technology allows a concept to
take shape, and the interplay between technology and theory will likely
continue in the years to come.

The decision rule concerning DLC versus ID may slide toward DLCs as we
learn more about what works. In particular, we need to better understand
how established instructional systems (e.g., school classrooms) can
migrate toward greater openness, eventually resulting in a displacement
of instruction for a community model. A transition model that outline
this growth trajectory would be a most welcome research agenda in the
coming years.

In the meantime, we will continue studying how dynamic learning
communities take shape, how they self-organize, and how they support
learning. Documenting cases empirically is an important part of that
agenda, and will help to clarify several issues mere ly touched on in this
paper.

Notes

(1)
Note our attribution of intentionality to the DLC (it "wants" this or
"seeks" that). This issue is somewhat controversial; for example, Bateson
(1972) avoids such language because it leads to a category error--thinking
that systems have a mind in the sa me way humans do. Part of our message,
however, is that complex systems do seem to have minds of their own; that
is, they come to behave as though they had intentions. Whether this
crosses a boundary of appropriate discourse, and moves into an anthropom
orphic error, we will speak of systems as having intentionality because it
is a useful shorthand for understanding complex systemic behavior.

(2)
This example comes from our own experience maintaining Instructional
Technology Connections
(http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itcon.html).
In response to a student's
complaint, we can only shrug our shoulders and mumble something about the
wonders of an open system!